


sure as the world keeps the moon in the sky

by perpetualskies



Series: lindo a crescer [2]
Category: Football RPF
Genre: M/M, intertextuality baby, oscar left for football not for money, set in the same verse as 'it's funny how when you come around' but can be read as a stand-alone
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-05
Updated: 2018-07-05
Packaged: 2019-05-31 06:55:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,905
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15114128
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/perpetualskies/pseuds/perpetualskies
Summary: On his way to Shanghai, Oscar arranges for a stopover in Paris.





	sure as the world keeps the moon in the sky

**Author's Note:**

> David signed a five year contract to move from London-based club Chelsea and join Thiago at Paris Saint-Germain in June 2014. He moved back two years later, in August 2016. After a little more than four years with Chelsea, Oscar signed for Shanghai SIPG, and made his first appearance for the club in February 2017. All three of them were starting members for Brazil's squad during the World Cup 2014 in Brazil.
> 
> Title from Tom Odell's "Magnetised".
> 
> DISCLAIMER: This is a work of fiction and means no disrespect towards the parties depicted within. Please do NOT share this with the players or anyone associated with them, or re-post this work anywhere else.
> 
> Constructive criticism is always appreciated. Comments are love ❤

On his window seat in aisle 9, belt fastened for landing, Oscar is dragging the palms of his hands across his thighs, watching Paris shape into view below the sleek belly of the air plane. The afternoon slowly gives way to the darker grey of sundown. Beneath him, the headlights are trailblazing the onset of something lush and anxious in his chest. It feels strange, this moment in time he carved out for them from the misalignment of flight schedules, this little pocket of selfishness wrung from the hands of a fading timeline, from the never quite articulated inventory of could-have-beens. They could have done this a million times, come up with a million different excuses. Instead they found each other looking across the wrong river, passing the wrong landmarks, exchanging messages with never quite the right amount of question marks, that were left on read for just a little bit too long. He’s here now, though, touching down on the landing strip without the slightest shake up, the French around him resuming at a louder volume, a kindness, really, to mask the nervous stutter of his heart.

Thiago is waiting for him in the parking lot, grounding and unsettling Oscar both with just a look, the quick brush of his hand against his elbow, the way his silences so often stretch the definition of semantics. Oscar wants to do something stupid right then and there, blushes and feels every bit the boy he was when it all started. Back then the entire world seemed to converge towards a single greater purpose, and between the flashes of glory at Maracanã, the sharp sense of responsibility before his own people, he was spending his days thrumming with anticipation, counting down the hours until he would make his way over to the captain’s room, until David would open the door and beckon him in. Those nights stretched impossibly thin and when he sometimes slipped back a little bit too late into the morning, flushed a little bit too fast at some innocuous comment, Willian had already quietly learned to look the other way.

“Does he know you’re here?” Thiago asks as they are getting off the motorway.

Oscar shakes his head no.

 

He’s been here before but never alone, never without David. Oscar had surprised himself when he had booked that flight, had surprised himself by his willingness to lie to David, to tell him not to come to the airport because I’d be easier that way. He tells himself it’s not _exactly_ a lie. Thiago was his captain first, then Thiago was _David’s_. What was there left for him to claim? More so, what’s left for him to claim _now_ , on a rainy Tuesday night before an early check-in at Charles de Gaulle and a four year contract at Shanghai SIPG?

They should have had more time, he thinks. Now it seems the shots they had at this have slipped through the cracks of the international transfer market, have rooted themselves in a national angst so great it threatens to eclipse their own need for redemption. Time, too, had spoiled them rotten. Now it makes a point of showing them how fast it can go, how little it needs to bound and skip ahead and leave their hands cupped around nothing.

Thiago’s flat it spacious, has Oscar slide his feet across the hardwood floors. They cook. Have wine Oscar pretends to like, almost convincingly. Move around each other with an easiness they have both missed, on and off the pitch. Oscar leans on the kitchen island and listens to Thiago talk, watches more than he listens, really, until Thiago laughs and calls him out on it, until they both laugh. It settles, the anxiousness, gives way to a pleasant warmth rising over dinner, over the way they arrange themselves on the couch afterwards. Oscar tips his head back against Thiago’s chest and sighs when he feels Thiago’s hand sink into his hair.

They could have done this a million different ways. It makes sense, suddenly, to have come so late.

 

“Tell me the three things you’re most afraid of right now,” Thiago asks, and Oscar’s breath deadlocks a little on an exhale. Paris has settled into charcoal, wound a heavy moon high up into its sky. At the back of his head is an image of David, quiet and hurt and unbelieving, so open and sharing despite himself, even when in pain. Oscar remembers it like the defeat they buried somewhere deep within a Brazilian winter, the way they tended to it, then fucked it out of each other, as best as they could, anyway. That winter had to come undone eventually, and when it did, Oscar was going back to London, alone, hating himself for every dive he took out of desperation, for every goal that could have been, and David was still telling him that nothing was going to change between them.

Oscar says: “That the crowd won’t cheer for me. That I won’t manage to learn a single word of Chinese,” and, quieter, “that I will not be able to come back.”

Later in the night there will be a fourth: that this is how it was always meant to be.

Oscar thinks of his luggage standing untouched in the corridor, of the way the rain in London must be slowly washing out the traces of all the people that never came to stay. That’s why it rains so much, he thinks, that’s why the grey in the sky never lets up. Somewhere all the way across the city, _Shanghai Pudong_ has just popped up on a departure board. The night closes in, warm and slow and with Thiago’s hand leaving a trail of goose bumps in its wake.

They’ve done this before, but never like this, never without David. Thiago offers him the guest room and Oscar smiles and shakes his head and kisses him first.

 

Oscar always gave David too much credit: to have found them where they have failed to find each other, to have locked them into a shared rhythm where they have always been a little bit out of pace. To have grounded them in the offsides of the world, to have allowed for time and space to find a way around each other around them. David the broker, the fixer, the intermediary of desire. But here they are, just the two of them, transferring a caress from a thumb to a hipbone, from the back of a hand to the inside of a thigh, releasing a quiet sigh into the hollow of a throat, doing just fine on their own.

Oscar could count them out, a million different realities collapsing into the one that holds them closest, that lends the softest sheen to Thiago’s skin. He doesn’t need to. He pushes himself up, catches Thiago’s bottom lip off guard, chases after a taste, puts himself in the trajectory of pleasure. Thiago is almost unbearably gentle, trades him kisses long and persuasive, as if to say: you’ve always got a place here, you know there’s more than just that one way to belong.

Outside, Paris is standing guard, impassive. The metro stations are closed, the little corner stores needling an eclectic thread of customers, twitchy strip lights like beacons in the night. The Seine weaves and weaves the faintest murmur along its bank.

 

Oscar is not sure how long he sleeps, but he wakes before the alarm, nervous to oversleep, nervous to miss a plane and read too much into it. For a sick moment he thinks himself back in London, panics when the angles between two bodies don’t add up, when the light slants at a steeper gradient than he is used to. Then Thiago sighs and nudges his knee along his thigh and Oscar’s memory rewinds, past Thiago’s warmth, a quiet night of finding ways to fit themselves against each other, past the different, more brazen kind of rain and the Eiffel Tower hinted at amidst the tin roofs, skips right back to David and the way he never asked him not to go, or maybe he did, in all the wrong ways.

Oscar turns and pushes back under the covers, finds a way to dream himself back to when the world couldn’t have tasted any sweeter, to when the future flung itself at them only with the boldest, brightest timeline. They should have had more time, Oscar thinks again and again. For easy mornings, for coffee and newspapers, for kissing each other awake or back to sleep, for all the intricacies of one life cross stitched into the fabric of another. He trails his mouth across the nearest patch of skin, feels Thiago stir against him, relishes the way his arm instinctively draws around his waist. He’s going to take this with him, the scent, the sound, the heavy, mediated necessity of this. He’s going to learn to commemorate it, is going to know it in the dark.

He’s known goodbyes since he was little, has tended to them well as time went on. Has seen them grow, solidify or manifest even when nobody was leaving. They never touched, or made him touch, or smiled against his collar bone like this. They never felt like it was only the beginning.

 

Oscar turns off the alarm, then casts his gaze onto the heavy line of curtains staving off another day. David woke up to the same mornings, he thinks, sighs, then turns to look the other way. The anxiousness sneaks back in, a nauseating pulp that pushes up the moment the bathroom door falls closed. Oscar stares at himself in the mirror for a long time, splashes his face, then thinks: _what are you even doing_. He’s put himself through this before, and yet. Thiago smells it on him right away, and maybe this, too, is why he had waited for so long. He pulls him in, cradles his face between his hands. Oscar expects a speech, a scolding even. The captain pulling you aside in the tunnel, talking some sense into your head. Thiago brushes his thumb across his cheek bone, and somehow that is enough. “Why do we always have to choose,” Oscar says, and hides against his captain’s chest. If Thiago knows, he keeps it folded in his silence, keeps it locked like Oscar in his arms.

 

Oscar goes to the airport alone. Showers, then spends the last minutes drinking his coffee too quickly and kissing himself breathless. Leaves behind a calculated trail of t-shirt and underwear, some toiletries he puts next to David’s in the bathroom, a little disarray on Thiago’s book shelf that makes him feel way too proud of himself.

“You call me when you get there, yeah?” Thiago says when the taxi driver rings the doorbell. Then, when Oscar’s almost turned to leave: “Call us both.”

Oscar’s checked in the night before already, enjoys a quiet ride to the airport with the early sky casting a patchy grey amongst the tentative specks of blue. It’s hard to believe how much has happened in the last 24 hours, hard to believe how much will happen still. He feels his phone buzz with a message, smiles before he even reaches to retrieve it.

 _Z_ _hù nǐ hǎoyùn_ , it says. _That’s three words for you already._ A series of emojis that makes him chuckle. And: _Y_ _ou’ll do great._

Oscar can’t wait.

 


End file.
